The battle lines over immigration extend across a broad front: secure borders, walls, sanctuary cities, “Dreamers,” undocumented workers, and national security are debated with sustained ferocity. But whatever your views, the benefits of one kind of immigration should cause little argument: educated people with advanced skills that are hard to find in the United States and are needed by U.S. companies. This is also an area that could enjoy genuine bipartisan support.

Conversely, policies that would pull up the drawbridge and shut out talent will harm American competitiveness and our ability to create jobs.

For years, American companies have made extensive use of H-1B visas to fill critical skills gaps. Many of those workers later achieve permanent residence through green cards. Large technology companies have been the primary beneficiaries, but many H-1Bs are also used in the health care industry, by midsize companies, and even startups. Through these visas, American companies have attracted some of the world’s best talent.

The visa program has been wildly popular, with its annual cap of 85,000 filled within days. Competition for green cards (permanent residence), which many H-1B holders later apply for, is even more intense, involving waits of up to 10 years.

We need these people and their skills, but the program also needs reform. Some entry-level workers, while qualified, don’t have extraordinary skills. Many are paid less than comparable U.S. workers: $65,000 versus $130,000 for an engineer in Silicon Valley. And playing cost arbitrage, some employers have used visa holders to replace U.S. workers. That’s not what the program was created for.

Going forward, it should refocus on what it was designed to do: help U.S. companies attract global talent, supplementing but not replacing qualified American workers. Some companies that previously relied solely on “offshoring” information technology work have adopted new approaches that focus on growing information-technology talent in the United States. Infosys, for example, plans to create 10,000 “net new jobs” in the United States, building an American talent pool through partnerships with academic institutions. Behind this new model are U.S. companies that want more local hires. This takes us in the right direction.

But the Trump administration isn’t waiting. Under President Trump’s “hire American, buy American” executive order, the federal government is intensifying the review of H-1B applications, and limiting extensions (which are granted for up to four years, usually while visa holders wait for green cards). A related regulatory change would rescind the ability of spouses of H-1B holders to work. Yet another change affecting skilled immigration could come if the Trump administration terminates the International Entrepreneur Rule, an Obama-era regulation that lets foreign entrepreneurs who found companies extend their stay in the United States. These are regulatory changes, however, and the program’s future is ultimately up to congressional lawmakers.

Any high-skill-visa reform should include these goals:

•Continue the H-1B program and allow its numerical cap to float to meet demand.

•Support the existing 20,000 set-aside under the cap for holders of advanced degrees from U.S. universities.

•Give visa holders the freedom to move between employers, and spouses the ability to work.

•Provide stronger protections for American workers to preclude their displacement.

•Support STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education and retraining for U.S. workers.

•Phase in changes, to limit disruption for workers and businesses.

•Help retain long-term talent by increasing the number of employment-based green cards.

•Create an entrepreneur visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who want to start U.S. companies.

Bills on skilled immigration are pending in the House and Senate, and a new bill by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called the Immigration Innovation Act of 2018, was introduced last month. Though not perfect, it’s the best by far and achieves these objectives in a balanced way. Congressional representatives from both parties should support it.

How we manage skilled immigration matters. In contrast to aging countries like Japan that have slow growth but severely limited immigration, much of our economic strength is linked to immigration. According to the Kauffman Foundation, immigrant entrepreneurs are twice as likely to start businesses as native-born Americans; more than half of America’s billion-dollar startups have an immigrant co-founder; and 16 percent of the U.S. college-educated population is foreign born. The nonpartisan Center for American Entrepreneurship finds that 43 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 were founded or co-founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant; for the top 35 companies, the share is 35 percent. These companies aren’t just in tech centers like the Bay Area, but are found in cities and states across the country.

Retaining and reforming the H-1B visa program will support employment and help us keep our edge. And welcoming international entrepreneurs who create those jobs will take us into the future. Silicon Valley companies have much to gain, but so does the country. This should be a priority for the president and both parties.

Sean Randolph is senior director at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.

Demagogues have railed against immigrants for over 150 years. But the fact is that America's higher educational system still draws the best from around the world, and many stay on to build the economy--and win Nobel prizes.

Quote:

In 2016, all six American winners of the Nobel Prize in economics and scientific fields were immigrants. Moreover, since 2000, immigrants have been awarded 40 percent, or 31 of 78, of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in Chemistry, Medicine and Physics, according to research from the National Foundation for American Policy.

H1B has gone way beyond filling the gap. Asians are taking all the finance positions and Indians all the I.T. positions.

Come down off your throne and look around at real people having to work for a living you pompous windbag.

Silicon Valley is the definition of a competitive job market for IT. India graduates 10X the engineers we do. Its an open competition, and nobody is "taking" anything, the best man/woman will win the position based on their abilities...

Boggsy—you just don’t watch enough Fox. Somehow conservatives think that having some of the smartest people from other countries come here to get an education, and stay and build companies and pay taxes, is a bad thing.

Stephen Miller, senior policy adviser to President Donald Trump, was called out on his immigration “hypocrisy” by his uncle in a scathing op-ed published Monday on Politico.

David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, accused both his nephew and Trump of becoming “numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions.”
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” Glosser wrote in his piece.

Miller is credited with crafting some of the Trump administration’s most controversial immigration policies, including family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border and the travel ban, which targets immigrants from five mostly Muslim countries.

Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human. David S. Glosser, uncle of Stephen Miller

Glosser pointed out that Miller’s family has benefited from American immigration policies the Trump administration is seeking to corrode. Miller’s relatives gained citizenship though family-based immigration, which the Trump administration pejoratively refers to as “chain migration,” according to Glosser. The policy also likely helped first lady Melania Trump’s parents become U.S. citizens last week.

“President Trump wants to make us believe that these desperate migrants are an existential threat to the United States; the most powerful nation in world history and a nation made strong by immigrants,” Glosser wrote.

He continued: “Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human.”

In June, Yahoo News reported that Miller’s great-grandfather flunked his naturalization test in 1932. The report found Miller’s maternal grandparents came to Ellis Island in 1903 to escape anti-Semitic pogroms in Belarus.

“Unless your ancestors came on a slave ship or you’re Native American,” you came here as an immigrant, Jennifer Mendelsohn, who created the #resistancegenealogy hashtag, told Yahoo News.

The White House did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

President Trump’s in-laws are now officially American citizens, but did they use the very immigration method that President Trump has railed against for much of his presidency? Stephanie Ruhle digs into family reunification and what the president calls “chain migration.”
Aug.10.2018

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A top Republican fundraiser whose firm works for several prominent immigration hardliners is the partial owner of the land where the Mexican man accused of killing Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts lived rent-free, a farm spokeswoman said Friday.

Nicole Schlinger has long been a key fundraiser and campaign contractor for GOP politicians in Iowa and beyond, including this cycle for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Virginia Senate candidate Corey Stewart.

Schlinger is the president of Campaign Headquarters, a call center that makes fundraising calls, identifies supporters and helps turn out voters for conservative candidates and groups. Her business is one of the largest in Brooklyn, the central Iowa town where Tibbetts disappeared while out for a run on July 18.

Schlinger is married to Eric Lang, the president of the family-owned dairy that has acknowledged providing employment and housing for the last four years to Cristhian Bahena Rivera, the man charged with murder in Tibbetts' death.

The couple — along with her husband's brother Craig Lang and his wife — own farmland outside Brooklyn that includes trailers where some of the dairy's employees live for free as a benefit of their employment, farm spokeswoman Eileen Wixted confirmed.

She said Rivera lived there for the duration of his employment, and about half of the farm's other 10 workers do so as well. Under the arrangement, the farming company pays the couples to rent the land but workers do not have to pay, she said.

In an email Friday, Schlinger said that she was "shocked and deeply saddened" by Tibbetts' death and had never met Rivera. "The perpetrator should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, and when he meets his maker, suffer the consequences he deserves," she wrote.

She said that she was gifted an ownership interest in the land many years ago from her husband's family and that she has no role in the farming operation.

Still, the fact that one of its own operatives has indirect ties to the case could complicate GOP efforts to highlight the gruesome slaying in its political messaging ahead of the November midterm election. Dairy co-owner Craig Lang also was a Republican candidate for Iowa agriculture secretary, finishing third in a five-way race in the June primary.

_________________when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard.

Silicon Valley is the definition of a competitive job market for IT. India graduates 10X the engineers we do. Its an open competition, and nobody is "taking" anything, the best man/woman will win the position based on their abilities...

At equal pay??? Two equally qualified candidates, one will work for $130K and the other $65K (from mac's post), who gets hired? That's the issue. If you were a student thinking about a tech engineering degree, knowing that Asian or Indian green card workers will work for half what you would get, would you continue in that field of study? If there is a shortage of American tech people, our immigration/green card program likely contributes to the problem.

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